De La Soul have detailed their first album in 12 years, confirming its many guest stars.
‘And The Anonymous Nobody’ will be released in April, following 2004’s ‘The Grind Date’. The record was funded by fans via Kickstarter.
With the album’s release drawing near, the hip-hop act have confirmed to Rolling Stone that Damon Albarn, Usher and Snoop Dogg will appear.
Also among the guests are Justin Hawkins from The Darkness, rapper 2 Chainz, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, plus Jill Scott, Pete Rock, Estelle and Roc Marciano. A planned Axl Rose collaboration failed to materialise.
Kelvin ‘Posdnous’ Mercer explained of Byrne’s involvement: “We were going through a bunch of stuff. Just putting stuff in what was gonna be called the trash file. And so I made I point, ‘Look at this song here, we can’t rhyme with this. This sound like something Talking Heads would be on,’ and it was like, DINNNNG! Wait a minute, what if we got David Byrne to do this track?'”
Getty“[Byrne] just did this amazing just humming and scatting over the beat. He said, ‘I don’t have the words yet but this is what I hear… Tell me what you think.’ He’s asking me for my opinions?! I’m like, ‘You’re fucking David Byrne! You shit on the track it’s good!'”
“I don’t want to sit here and say it’s another [1989 debut] ‘3 Feet High and Rising’, I would never say that,” Mercer added. “But that element of not knowing what you’re doing, like, it felt like ‘3 Feet High and Rising’. Like, we walked in, we didn’t know the rules.”
“We even at one point let Nas hear a bunch of tracks. And it was just dope how he was like, ‘Yo man, this is like some avant-garde shit.'”